All the Missing Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

sending me a letter a few weeks ago?”
    He drummed his fingers on the table. “Sure. A letter.” A stall tactic—I could feel him grasping, trying to remember.
    I pulled out the paper, unfolded it on the table between us, saw his eyes narrow at the page. “You sent this to me.”
    His gaze lingered on the words before he looked up, his blue eyes watery, slippery as his thoughts. That girl. I saw that girl.
    I heard my heartbeat in my head, like her name, knocking around. “Who did you mean? Who did you see?”
    He looked around the room. Leaned closer. His mouth opening and closing twice before the name slipped through in a whisper. “The Prescott girl.”
    I felt all the hairs, one at a time, rise on the back of my neck. “Corinne,” I said.
    He nodded. “Corinne,” he said, as if he’d found something he was looking for. “Yes. I saw her.”
    I looked around the cafeteria, and I leaned closer to him. “You saw her? Here?” I tried to picture the ghost of her drifting through these halls. Or her heart-shaped face and bronze hair, the amber eyes and the bow lips—what she’d look like ten years later. Slinging an arm around me, pressing her cheek against mine, confessing everything in a whisper just for me: Best practical joke ever, right? Aw, come on, don’t be mad. You know I love you.
    Dad’s eyes were far off. And then they sharpened again, takingin his surroundings, the papers in my bag, me. “No, no, not here. She was at the house.”
    â€œWhen, Dad. When?” She disappeared right after graduation. Right before I left. Ten years ago . . . The last night of the county fair. Tick-tock, Nic. Her cold hands on my elbows, the last time I touched her.
    Not a sighting since.
    We stapled her yearbook picture to the trees. Searched the places we were scared to search, looking for something we were scared to find. We looked deep into each other. We unearthed the parts of Corinne that should’ve remained hidden.
    â€œI should ask your mom . . .” His eyes drifted again. He must’ve been pulling a memory from years ago. From before Corinne disappeared. From before my mother died. “She was on the back porch, but it was just for a moment . . .” His eyes went wide. “The woods have eyes, ” he said.
    Dad was always prone to metaphor. He’d spent years teaching philosophy at the community college. It was worse when he was drinking—he’d pull on lines from a book, reordered to suit his whim, or recite quotes out of context from which I’d desperately try to find meaning. Eventually, he’d laugh, squeezing my shoulder, moving on. But now he would get lost in the metaphor, never able to pull himself back out. His moment of lucidity was fading.
    I leaned across the table, gripping his arm until he focused on my words. “Dad, Dad, we’re running out of time. Tell me about Corinne. Was she looking for me?”
    He sighed, exasperated. “Time isn’t running out. It’s not even real, ” he said, and I knew I had lost him— he was lost, circling in his own mind. “It’s just a measure of distance we made up to understand things. Like an inch. Or a mile.” He moved his hands as he spoke, to accentuate the point. “That clock,” he said, pointing behind him. “It’s not measuring time. It’s creating it. You see the difference?”
    I stared at the clock on the far wall, at the black second hand moving, moving, always moving. “And yet I keep getting older,” I mumbled.
    â€œYes, Nic, yes,” he said. “You change. But the past, it’s still there. The only thing moving is you.”
    I felt like a mouse in a wheel, trying to have a conversation with him. I had learned not to argue but to wait. To avoid agitation, which would quickly slide into disorientation. I’d try again tomorrow,